SNA gets its day
I just read a great article in Fortune magazine about Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the benefits it can yield in an organization.
To me this is further fodder on what have been relatively obscure tools coming more into the mainstream and being refined for use with progressive learning and development departments.
Orbital RPM has just launched a SNA with one of our large clients as a way to find the best candidates to make up the ‘core group’ of a community of practice. This is being implemented in a very large, traditional organization that has always relied on traditional training for its team members.
We will be using the same amount of money the organization would have spent on designing, developing and delivering a one-time course…an event…but instead we will be engaged with them for a year. Helping sustain their learning community, manage the knowledge that’s flowing and integrate new-comers. What a bargain!
It’s projects like these and articles like the one in Fortune that will allow us to chip away at the conventional mindset commonly applied to the training arena.
Hi –
Good post and mostly good article. It does have some problems.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a powerful academic tool for scholars and researchers. Network analysis in general is an important discipline for business as well.
However, for business performance improvements, SNA only shows a small fraction of the picture. Key business processes, for example, are entirely left out of organizational SNA.
A far more complete method for network analysis of business is value networks. Value networks and analysis (VNA) employee the identical mathematical network analysis rigor of SNA but also creates meaning and mappings of the critical process infrastructure. It furnishes visualization and optimization of entire business and economic ecosystems, including social relationships, knowledge pathways and key business process. See comparisons:
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166268
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166232
Most value networks methods, tools, applications and technologies are open source, open content. This is the open gateway –
http://www.value-networks.com/
Cordially,
-j
http://xri.net/=jheuristic
Thank you John – I’m not familiar with VNA. I’ve looked briefly at the site you provided and can guarantee that I’ll spend significant time with this topic.
From a learning and development perspective, successful companies are spending over 50% of their ‘training’ dollars on aspects of their value-chain outside of their internal employees. I can see VNA being a very valuable tool in identifying where to focus L&D in the value-chain so that it has the greatest impact.